Waugh Is Me

The generous James Wolcott at Vanity Fair has used my post on Brideshead Revisited as a launching-off point for his own revisitation of that Waugh classic.

Speaking of Waugh, yesterday I finished the wacky and terribly sad (and also terribly weird) A Handful of Dust. Poor Tony Last. He may have been a bit of an unquestioning idiot, in love with preserving the past (for what reason? Just because), and a member of a world that needed to perish, circumstances being what they were, but he was a good soul and he meant no one any harm. I’ve been working on a piece on it, which will go up in the next couple of days, but I’ve been a bit busy with other things recently. One of the things that is fascinating about A Handful of Dust is that there is an entire section that is almost entirely dialogue. Narrative bits here and there, but really nothing more detailed than “he said” or “she said”. We switch scenes, leaping into conversations already under-way, then switch back, and the collage-effect of an entire literally chattering class is pretty brutal. The voices join together to form a cacophony, almost like a crescendo in a music score, and as it went on and on and on, I couldn’t help but think of the dangers piling up just across the Channel, the forces aligning, the clouds gathering … and nobody … nobody seems to be paying attention. It’s an indictment, without ever stating so, Waugh’s stock-in-trade.

More to come, I just wanted to thank Mr. Wolcott, as always, for reading, and thanks for your post on Brideshead Revisited. I’ve had that book on the brain for about a week now, so it was nice to read your words on it.